Clichés and DOGE…what a week.

Clichés typically become clichés because they are fundamentally true. As someone who fancies himself a bit of a writer, I spend most of my time avoiding their use. But not today.

A penny saved is a penny earned. Federal government spending is filled with waste, bloat, fraud, and well-intended programs that have become ineffective, redundant, or no longer match our priorities. The desire to eliminate these things from government is good, so long as we remember that the ends don’t justify the means.

The devil’s in the details. Many a great idea has failed on poor execution. Enter DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Enter Elon Musk and his merry band of disruptors. Bulls in a china shop. My issues with DOGE and Elon Musk are many. Some are of style, some are of substance, some are constitutional, and many center upon the scary unknowns of unintended consequences. I’m also not quite sure that these extra-governmental actors – this crowdsourced group of unvetted techies without proper security clearances – are benevolent, acting with nothing but noble, laudable goals. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Birds of feather flock together. I don’t care for brash people that have little regard for long-established norms of behavior and seem to have little regard for the impact of their actions on others. It shows in small and in large ways. In small ways it shows in wearing a t-shirt and ball cap in the oval office, in the presence of the President, while addressing the assembled media. The oval is a temple of our government and the decisions made in that room are far too important for casualness in any form. In larger ways it shows in Musk’s Trumponian use of demagoguery and hypocrisy. He is an unelected, unconfirmed actor, yet he has the gall to offer a lecture on how unelected bureaucrats have separated our government from the will of the people. He now is an unelected bureaucrat. And for a man who has amassed so much of his wealth from government subsidies and government contracts, his rantings on excessive government spending ring more than a bit hollow.

Thomas Edison found a thousand ways not to make a lightbulb. Musk by his nature isn’t the right man for this job. He is brilliant and successful, to be sure. But he, and the tech giants that formed the backdrop behind President Trump at the second inaugural, built their companies and their fortunes by being disruptors. They go hard, move fast, throw a lot of things at the wall, and when they fail along the way, they build another rocket, push out another software fix, or buy a competitor that does it better. Failure to them is a success. But established government doesn’t have the luxury of failing. It is charged with ensuring our citizens and corporations act responsibly, our food is safe, our medications are unadulterated, and, at the most extreme, that our towers don’t come down at the hands of terrorists. It has not the luxury of getting it wrong, not once. Because when it does, there is typically a body count. And for that reason alone, a disruptor mentality is dangerous. Instead, a methodical approach to cost cutting is warranted in government.

Throw the baby out with the bathwater. Methodical isn’t how Musk is operating. There’s waste in that agency. Grab the chainsaw prop. Don’t surgically go through it and eliminate the parts that don’t work, are wasteful, or downright scandalous.  Instead, shut down the whole of it. Wait to see what breaks that may have been necessary after all, and put something new in place to address that. It is the chaotic equivalent of setting all traffic lights in the country to blinking yellow to see if traffic signals are really necessary.

Haste makes waste. Some of DOGE’s work will be stopped by courts, and surely all of it will be reviewed by courts. The taxpayer may ultimately pay to have those agency signs put back on those buildings, pay for violating notice requirements to federal workers under union contracts, and pay for the flippancy and potential illegality of tweets such as “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

A wolf in sheep’s clothing? In a position that should demand no conflicts of interest, real or perceived, Musk is poorly cast. The drain-the-swampers rail against the establishment, the elite, and those they believe have masterminded some sort of world control. Yet they seem to have no concerns with Musk gaining more power. He is the richest man on the planet. He controls one of the largest means of communication in X, means of space travel in Space X, satellite communication in Starlink, and is launching a new digital payment system. Wouldn’t it be prudent, then, to have concerns about him having access through his DOGE team to the federal government’s payment system, social security files, and IRS files? Certainly, if one had ulterior motives, there is no better setup than this. The quarter billion dollars of his own money spent to help elect President Trump could end up being the single greatest speculative investment in history.

Pick your battles. So far, DOGE targets seem largely chosen for show. Chief among these is the federal workforce. Total federal spending per year now totals just under $7 trillion. DOGE’s focus on the federal workforce would have you believe it is a huge percentage of that annual expenditure. But total payroll and benefits for all federal employees is estimated to be just $384 billion, or less than 6%. So why the focus right out of the gate? Could it be because it nicely aligns with the “Drain the Swamp” shtick.  We currently have 3 million federal employees including the post office. Though it has fluctuated over the years, it is interesting to note that 60 years ago we were already at 2.8 million. Over those same years, though, it is the number of government contractors, like SpaceX, that have actually grown.

What goes around comes around. The critical fault in the idea of DOGE is one of my biggest frustrations with the Trump administration in general. That is that they assume they will be in charge in perpetuity and what they put in place will remain in place.  But we know that won’t be the case. The American voter is finicky and has a distorted view of the president’s ability to affect the economy. Economic downturns happen and both Republicans and Democrats have been tossed out on the answer to that dreaded question – “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”  In fact, with the 47 presidents we have had in our nation’s history, party control of the White House has changed 27 times. The Democrats will right their ship. They will capitalize upon and organize around the blowback from the Trump administration overreaches. They will win again in two or four or six years. And it may well be President Trump’s behavior that will hasten the Democrat return.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. When the Democrats do recapture the White House, they will build further, as each successive president seems to, on the toolkit of unilateral executive action. They will rehire the wrongly terminated. They will bring back those who took payouts to leave. They will restart programs and redeploy assets. And the money the taxpayers spent to get rid of things under President Trump will get added to the money taxpayers spend to restart those things. And so we will have spent more money and lost years of institutional knowledge and progress, for nothing. We will have endured all the short-term disruption without ever realizing the long-term benefits.

We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But perhaps worse than never realizing the long-term benefits is the ill-advised plan that the Trump administration is considering to distribute to taxpayers a portion of what DOGE “saves.” It is a version of the same mistake President Trump made in his first term with the excessive COVID payments that began our horrible run of inflation. It is mortgaging our future to buy support. It is populism run amuck; it is not conservatism. Even if these DOGE savings were real and not undone when Democrats regain control, there wouldn’t be money available to return to taxpayers.  Firstly, we have an almost $2 trillion annual deficit, meaning we spend $2 trillion more than we raise in taxes each year. DOGE would have to save us $2 trillion before there was any money to talk about. That simply isn’t possible without cutting Social Security and Medicare. But even if it were possible, true conservatism would advocate putting that money toward our $36 trillion debt before giving it back to taxpayers. Then we can debate tax rates in future years if savings do materialize.

You reap what you sow. Lastly, there is the biggest potential danger of this DOGE endeavor…success. I can almost see the 60 Minutes segments five, 10, and 20 years from now. The unintended consequences. A demoralized and trimmed FBI, government watchdogs eliminated, personal data of all Americans on the laptop of a 2o year old DOGEr, what could possibly go wrong? The real dangerous impacts of these rushed DOGE decisions may not be seen for years after President Trump leaves office. Others will be blamed for the lapses. And make no mistake, our adversaries will capitalize on any holes created by DOGE.

Guardrails are an interesting thing. They usually aren’t put in place until after an accident happens the first time. If you take a close look at one, you can usually see where they have been hit and patched. Those scuffs and patches tell you that a similar accident happened again, and the guardrail did its job. Removing a guardrail invites the original accident that you had learned from, to reoccur. And when it reoccurs, all that is left is evaluating the costs – lost lives, installation expenses, removal expenses, more lost lives, lawsuits, and the inevitable reinstallation expenses.

He who laughs last, laughs best. I started this piece by saying the idea of eliminating waste, fraud, and inefficiency is a good thing. So how do we do it right? Fraud is the easy one because all of us besides the fraudsters agree on eliminating it. But you need federal employees to identify it and prosecute it! Hopefully we don’t fire them all. The rest of government spending is a bit trickier because we live in a politically divided country, meaning we don’t all agree on what is or isn’t necessary government spending. Further, advocates of a specific expenditure are typically too protective of it to allow even a sensible discussion around eliminating waste, inefficiency, or redundancy. And the vitriol in our public debate has made us all inherently distrusting of one another. So, process matters. Transparency matters. Real and lasting change that survives change in party control must be done by consensus or surely it will be undone. We must first set up a DOGE that garners trust and credibility, remembering that 50.8% of the electorate voted for someone other than President Trump. It must first be constitutional. So there are three options. The first option is that Congress could authorize a new department in a bill signed into law by the President. The head of this agency should be confirmed by the Senate and all persons with access to sensitive data should be vetted to receive the relevant security clearance. The second option is that advisors to the President, such as Musk, could make recommendations to the President of things that should be looked at and the President could direct his confirmed agency and department heads to do the actual work involved. Congress with the power of the purse and with its oversight role would still need to be involved. The third option would be a commission, much like the Social Security Commission in the 80’s, appointed by the President for a short, specified period to review options. That commission should include bipartisan elected officials. And to encourage results, the members should not be Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, but rather sensible middle grounders. But here again, Congress would have to enact any recommended changes through legislation. Each of these options has drawbacks but each is better than the current DOGE. Regardless of the option chosen, it must work in a methodical, surgical way that realizes its actions will have real and serious consequences that will disrupt lives. And we as citizens must realize we won’t be 100% happy with the results because, again, we as a people don’t completely agree on the role of government. Imagine if the Trump administration did this the correct way, sharing credit with Democrats and adding a much-needed mantle of magnanimity. It might just get a Republican elected president in 2028 instead of a whiplash back to the left.